The Political Economy

As reading "Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!' : The Political economy of a Commercial Intertext and having a discussion in the class period, I could understand how most of the American productions are made and the importance of understanding and analyzing political economy. Also, we talked about how concentration and conglomeration are getting more and more common these days, we, as a media consumer, are affected in so many ways. For example, one of the consequences of the concentration of the media is that we are limited and controlled what to watch and kinds of the information we get by few corporations which have power. In the article, Meehan used the example of vertical integration where Batman's products are sold in many forms. Like this example, we can easily see both horizontal and vertical integration as we consume mediated products.
However, I wanted to take some time to think about how these situations are changing in a subtle way as the advancement of the new media. Majority of the mediated products might be dominant in few corporations. On the other hands, small and independent corporations also started to have a chance to reach audiences in much easier way, due to the facts that internet allows people to bring out their products. Even though they will not get so much attention at first as the major corporation, they still have opportunity to express and promote. From the political economy analysis, these small and independent corporations take responsibility on their own to maximize profits and minimize the risks in much smaller scale. I personally think that we cannot exclude these small corporations in our political economy analysis because it does affect ownership and government policies directly or indirectly.